[H-GEN] Debian install floppy boot problem

Greg Black gjb at gbch.net
Tue Apr 22 00:38:14 EDT 2003


On 2003-04-22, Rick Phillips wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-04-22 at 12:21, David Seikel wrote:
> >  --- Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> wrote[1]: 
> > > [1] I don't know why people write installers that want to be
> > >     clever with the display.  Plain text installers are easy to
> > >     use and don't leave you in the middle of a dialogue about
> > >	  partitioning the disk where the important information is not
> > >	  visible -- that makes for scary stuff when installing onto a
> > >	  disk that holds two other OS installations that should not
> > >	  be disturbed.
> > 
> > It's part of the effort to make Linux "ready for the desktop".  I suspect
> > that means, graphical OS installers, graphical app installers, graphical
> > configuration, plug and pray, task bar, start menu, and compatability with
> > Microsoft Office.
> 
> David is right - the Xandros install is a beautiful thing - it asks
> (from memory) 5 questions during the install and I think 2 of them are
> for names and passwords.  It automatically partitions, sets up Samba and
> NFS shares on existing networks, installs internal Lucent based modems
> "out of the box" and is a dream for the uninitiated who want to use
> Linux but don't want the steep learning curve.

How ghastly.  This kind of thing might be a good thing under
certain limited circumstances[2], but it's a nightmare when a
competent person wants to do something that's outside of the
expectations of the author of the installation utility.  When
stuff like this is provided, it should only be as an optional
alternate path to installation, never as *the* way to get the
job done.  My experience with all Linux installations is that
they never manage to forsee what I'm going to want and they just
get in my way.

In some cases, the documentation makes this seem worse than it
is.  For instance, had I believed the Debian doco on my CD, I'd
have wasted some time setting up a temporary TFTP server on my
network because the doco said that was the only way to get where
I wanted to go.  As it happened, I decided to leave that ugly
step until it became essential and discovered that the install
software gave me the option of installing via NFS, which was a
much better choice.

Mind you, neither the doco nor my experience with the installer
gave me any clues about how to do the install without a screen
or keyboard attached, something that's both easy to do and well
documented for systems like FreeBSD.  It might seem that it
didn't really matter in this case, since the laptop obviously
has a screen and keyboard -- but if there'd been an easy to use
serial console install option, I'd have been able to escape from
the attempt to drive the screen which turned it into so much
useless real estate.

> If you want to get
> Debian (Woody) up and running in a very quick time, I would certainly
> recommend it.

I'm not interested in getting anywhere *fast* -- I just want to
see if (by some miraculous and completely unexpected bit of good
luck) one of these operating systems that I'm trying out will
actually run properly on my laptop.  I use this box every day
and can't afford for it to be clobbered by a test OS, so I need
to be able to control disk partitions and the like.

Now, while I'm whining, can somebody tell me how to make that
shpxvat boot selector thing that Debian installed remember which
OS I chose last time and default to that for the next boot,
instead of insisting on choosing Linux if nobody gets to it in
time?

Greg

[1] Original quote restored, as important material was cut out
    in some of the messages in this thread.  But junk about the
    list that *should* have been cut was not ...

[2] Such as a newbie doing a single-OS install on a dedicated
    computer or an expert doing a test install on a crash box.

-- 
Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> <http://www.gbch.net/gjb.html>
GPG signed mail preferred; further information in headers.
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